Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Marian cracks her knuckles as she paces the length of the cell with the restless desperation of a caged thing, boots scuffing against the cold stone.
Every few steps she stops, neck craning toward the narrow window, desperate for the smallest glimpse of Sherwood’s edge.
The sight is both a torture and a balm – freedom painted in green while she suffocates behind bars.
Her muscles scream from the thrashing the night before, but her body knows only motion.
Each step drags straw across stone. Each turn puts her back at the wall where the window waits.
Her eyes dart up, greedy, searching for a flash of antlers in the mist, a shape cutting free of the trees.
If Lox comes – when he comes – she has to find some way to warn him.
Even if she has to scream until her throat bleeds, she will get the message to him before the Sheriff’s trap can snap shut.
‘Would you please stop that incessant pacing?’ Allen groans, his voice drifting from his cell.
He’s sprawled in the hay, head tipped back against the flagstones, bruises mapping his jaw and temple.
A dark clot at his hairline makes her stomach knot, but his grin curves with a familiar insolence.
‘I know my head won’t be attached for much longer, but while I still have it, I’d prefer to reduce how much pain it’s in. ’
Marian stills mid-step. The joke shouldn’t land: it’s too sharp, too dark, but her throat makes an awful sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke. Allen will be the Sheriff’s warm-up. A throat to cut before the show begins.
‘Don’t say that,’ she whispers. ‘Please.’
Allen studies her in the half-light, grin fading to something softer, something almost kind.
‘I’ve always known my luck would end in a performance worthy of an audience.
I just never thought it would be singing my own funeral dirge.
’ Something in Marian buckles. She slides down the wall until her knees meet straw and the cold seeps through to bone.
‘Allen, I’m so . . . Saints, this is all my fault.
I’m so sorry.’ The apology pours out as if her mouth has found a spring and can’t stopper it.
‘I did this. My arrogance, my fury, my pride walked us right into the trap like a fool.’ Her throat tightens.
‘I swore I’d never be what they wanted me to be, and look at me.
’ She gestures at the bars, their shackles.
‘Exactly where I started. A pitiful, trapped thing. A lesson for other girls to cede to their husbands.’
Both their eyes fall to the crumpled bundle of fabric in the corner that the Sheriff had presented her with in the middle the night. She promptly tossed it aside, not wanting to be within an inch of it. Now, the ruined dress glares back at her, all throat and ribs and empty promise.
It’s the shade of bone left to weather. The silk netting is snagged and snarled by rough handling, and a bodice stiff with whalebone sits above it.
The hem, meant to skim polished tiles, is already streaked with soot and rust. Tiny seed pearls, pale as teeth, are stitched in rows running up the high collar neckline that will trap her the moment she slips it on.
Allen sighs. ‘Your pride didn’t put us here, Marian. Courage did. And courage is messy. It bleeds. It misjudges. Sometimes it breaks a nose and forgets there are ten more behind it.’
She shakes her head, but the tears keep coming, wetting the rust where her cheek presses to the bars.
‘The Sheriff picked you for a reason,’ he continues.
‘Not because you’re weak, or because you’re easy prey, but because you terrify him.
That’s why he wants to make a spectacle out of your ruin.
You’re not the pawn here, Marian. You’re the threat.
And that bastard is scrambling for every chain he can find to prove otherwise. ’
Her fingers swipe at her cheeks furiously, smearing soot and blood like war paint.
A shout rises from beyond the manor; a ragged note from the woods that sends her to her feet so fast the blood rushes from her head.
She scrambles to the slit of a window, toes straining for purchase.
She can’t see anything but the light itself, tilting brighter, cruelly indifferent. No antlers. No flicker of gold.
Clamouring footsteps rattle above them. A barked order echoes, and the parade of soldiers pours into the yard.
Boots thunder down the stairs, descending like a sentence.
Marian’s heartbeat climbs her throat. It feels too soon for Lox, and yet too late for anything else.
She squares her shoulders, preparing to face her groom with every ounce of her fury, but the figure that rounds the bend is not the Sheriff.
Eamon Hallomere stumbles into the torchlight, thinner than memory, eyes fever-bright against a grey face. In his hands, a ring of keys jangles.
Marian’s lip curls before she can help it. ‘Come to collect me for the noose disguised as a wedding band?’ She tips her chin at the dress. ‘I suppose you’ll walk me down the aisle in case the Sheriff needs a reminder of who sold me.’
Eamon flinches. He glances up the stairs, then back, urgency cracking through the papery calm he wears like a habit.
‘Spare me your hatred,’ he whispers, ‘there isn’t time for it.’
‘How dare you—’ Her words stop short when he hurries to her cell’s door, fitting the key to the old lock with hands that can still manage intricacy even when they shake. She can’t mask the shock spreading across her face.
‘I told the guards that fae were amassing at the far edge of the forest and sent them out on a sweep. They won’t be back for a quarter hour, if that.’ He pulls the door open with a groan, metal scraping against metal.
Marian’s eyes tighten in suspicion. ‘If you’re searching for gratitude, you’ll find none here.’ She steps out, keeping the bars as a barrier between their bodies, but she turns around so he can access her cuffs.
‘I’m not asking you to forgive me. Saints know, I don’t deserve it.
’ His fingers tremor against the cold metal before the cuffs click open and clatter to the ground.
‘When your mother died . . . the smidgeon of good that might have been left in me disappeared into the earth with her.
A man can rot so slow he calls it living, until, one day, he smells himself.
‘But that’s no excuse. I am here because I have one thing left worth doing, and I would do it even if you spat in my face for the rest of my days.
’ He stoops, snatches the ruin of silk from the straw, and thrusts it through the bars with a grimace.
‘Put it on.’ At her glare, he adds quickly, ‘The guards on the upper hall expect a bride. If anyone sees us, they’ll assume I’m marching you to the altar and him to the execution block.
Keep your chin down and walk as if nothing is amiss.
Once we are through the doors, run for the woods.
Take the hedgerow path and don’t look back. The orchard gate is already unbarred.’
She snatches the fabric from him. ‘You don’t get absolution for finally tripping on a conscience and locating a spine,’ she hisses, turning her back to him. ‘One good deed doesn’t balance a ledger written in suffering.’
Marian slips out of her clothes and into the dress as quickly as she can. Her skin crawls as the whalebone of the corset tightens around her ribs. The high collar bites at her throat. She knots the ruined laces herself, fingers sure, before turning back around.
Eamon works on Allen’s cell, keys rattling until the lock stutters, then yields with a scrape that twinges in her inner ear.
‘Much as I adore the rustic jewellery,’ Allen says, lifting his bound wrists. ‘These beauties cut me off from the good stuff. Feels like cotton stuffed in my veins.’
‘That’s the point.’ Eamon doesn’t look at him; he looks at the cuffs. ‘Iron and fae ore filaments in the hinges. It dampens whatever river of power runs through your kind.’ With a click, the manacles spring open.
‘Much better.’ Allen inhales like a swimmer breaking the surface. ‘Removing them practically turned my blood back on.’ He rubs his wrists and slowly his whole body changes, as if something invisible settles back into his bones.
Marian’s blood goes cold. ‘That’s how they mean to catch him, isn’t it?’
Eamon’s face falls, but he nods. ‘The Sheriff’s spread metal shavings around the soil of the entire estate and had the smiths craft a lattice of ore and iron, strung between pylons. Once Hood steps inside, they’ll wrap it around him until the magic inside him just . . . stops.’
Marian feels the floor tilt beneath her. ‘He’ll draw Lox in and cut him off from Sherwood. Make him mortal long enough to—’
‘Marian.’ Eamon says her name like a plea. He jerks his head toward the passage. ‘We must go.’
Eamon takes the lead, with steps swift but measured. Marian keeps to her father’s shadow with Allen beside her, his hands hidden behind his back as if still in chains.
The stairs cough them up into the manor’s gut.
Servants plaster themselves to the panelling when they see them.
Not one speaks. Fear grafts silence to their tongues.
A part of Marian wishes she could catch a glimpse of Tilda, to tell her handmaiden that she is okay, but the wish curdles uselessly in her mouth. There isn’t time for tenderness.
‘This way,’ Eamon breathes, turning down a narrow door tucked between two banks of cabinetry.
They cut through the scullery. Heat rolls out: the kitchen.
It breathes like a beast. Copper pots gleam along the wall; ovens glow with banked embers; the sweet-rot of old onions and the iron of knives rusting at their tangs mix in the air.
An older woman, fingers sticky with wet dough, takes in Marian’s dress, Allen’s dark hairline, and Eamon’s ruin of a face.
She reaches, without a word, to unlatch the door.
‘Thank you,’ Marian mouths as they pass.